Privacy-first corporate directory: what your team sees vs what's in Google Workspace

When you sync your Google Workspace directory to every employee’s phone, an obvious question comes up: should everyone see everything?

Workspace directories accumulate fields over time. The HR team added “Hire date” three years ago. Finance added “Cost center.” Operations added “Internal extension.” Each was added for a legitimate reason inside the admin console. None of it was meant to land in a junior designer’s phone contact card next to “Marko Petrović — Senior Engineer.”

The thing the directory exposes isn’t always the thing the team should see. Workspace Sync is built around that distinction. This post explains which fields travel, how the per-field controls work, and which fields companies think twice about.

Nine fields, and a switch for each

Workspace Sync doesn’t pass your whole Workspace profile through to the phone. It works with nine fields:

• First name and last name
• Email address
• Phone numbers
• Job title
• Department
• Organizations
• Addresses
• Photo

Everything else in the profile — custom attributes, cost centers, employee IDs, hire dates, manager relationships — never reaches the app at all.

A new organization starts with all nine switched on. In the admin dashboard, under Contacts → App view, each field has a switch. On means “send this to the mobile app.” Off means “don’t.” A live preview next to the switches shows exactly what a colleague’s card will look like.

What companies typically switch off

A few patterns show up across most setups.

Addresses

Workspace profiles often hold addresses, and not always office ones. A home address that HR needs for payroll has no business on every colleague’s phone. This is the field most companies turn off first, and our advice is to decide about it on day one.

Personal phone numbers

Some companies store a personal mobile next to the work number, in case the business phone is unavailable. Employees who gave that number for HR records didn’t necessarily consent to every colleague having it in their contacts. If personal numbers live in your directory, think about whether Phone numbers should travel, or clean the personal ones out of the shared profile.

Photos

A few companies turn off the photo for cultural reasons: some industries treat employee photos as personal information that shouldn’t be widely distributed. For most teams, photos are what lets new employees put faces to names, so they stay on.

What companies typically keep visible

Name, work email, phone, title and department are the set that makes the directory useful at all:

• Without the name, there’s no contact.
• Without the phone, you can’t call.
• Without the email, you can’t send a message outside of internal tools.
• Without the title and department, employees in larger teams have no quick way to know who’s responsible for what.

The principle: directory ≠ destination

The mental shift that makes per-field configuration feel natural is this:

The directory is a database. The mobile contact list is a surface. They don’t have to contain the same set of fields.

You don’t expose every column of your CRM to every salesperson’s phone. You wouldn’t expose every Slack profile field to every channel. Directories are no different — they contain rich metadata, and rich metadata is useful in admin contexts and confusing or invasive in employee-facing contexts.

The default of “show everything because it’s there” is a mistake people make once — they get pushback from someone whose information was exposed unexpectedly — and never make again. Looking at the field list before your team installs the app avoids the pushback entirely.

GDPR and data minimization

A practical note for European customers: under GDPR, the principle of data minimization says you should only expose the personal data needed for a specific purpose. A directory sync that exposes “every field because we can” arguably exceeds the lawful basis on which employees provided their data.

Configuring per-field controls — exposing only what’s necessary for the directory’s purpose (calling, emailing, knowing what role a colleague has) — keeps you well inside the minimization principle and gives you a concrete answer if it ever comes up.

We don’t intend this to be legal advice. But the alignment between practical defensibility and good defaults is worth noting: doing the privacy-aware thing also happens to be the legally cleanest thing.

Adjusting after the fact

What happens if your team is already using the app, and you realize a field should not be there?

1. Switch the field off in the admin dashboard. The app stops receiving it the next time it loads the directory.
2. Company contacts in phones follow. If your team lets the app keep colleagues in their phone’s own Contacts, the app removes the field from those contacts at its next update: when it is opened, and about once a day in the background.

What the app can’t reach is what someone copied elsewhere by hand, such as a contact card they shared or saved themselves. That is why the first look at the field list is worth doing before rollout.

Closing

Per-field control isn’t a flashy feature, and it doesn’t usually make landing-page copy. It’s also the setting companies come back to, especially after the first few weeks when they look at what they’re syncing and realize they want to dial it back.

If you’re evaluating directory sync tools, the question worth asking is: which fields does this product send to the mobile app, and how do I change that? If the answer is “all of them” with no override, you’re going to end up unhappy. If the answer is “a short, fixed list with a switch for each” — that’s the configuration model worth committing to.

See pricing — Workspace Sync is free for up to 5 users, and per-field controls are available from day one on every plan.